Yvette Audain currently resides in her birth city of Auckland, New Zealand. She has also lived and worked as a composing musician in Whitianga, Wellington and Melbourne (Australia). Her music has been performed throughout Australasia as well as in Japan and the USA.

Yvette, who predominantly focuses on woodwind instruments (clarinet, saxophone and flute), is also a vocalist and has worked as a professional musician in a variety of genres: classical (Auckland Philharmonia; Auckland Chamber Orchestra; New Zealand Opera), military band (the full-time Royal New Zealand Navy Band), Celtic-style originals (trio 'Doris'), free improvisation (Vitamin S), salsa (Cuban Accent Banda) and many more situations in between.

However, Yvette's principal performance interest is early jazz. After a brief stint leading the reed section of Brett's New Internationals, a 1920s dance orchestra, she went on to lead a smaller jazz ensemble affiliated to 'APOPS', the Auckland Philharmonia (AP) education programme, performing to school audiences around the Auckland region.

Yvette enjoys a productive, ever-rewarding career as a composer - achievements include having her work Eulogy read and recorded by the AP in their 2010 Graduate Composer Workshop, and programmed in the AP concert ‘Works With Words' in association with the 2011 Writers and Readers' Festival. From 2008 she has also been part of the AP's talented team of arrangers. Among the numerous commissions she has received has been Felix the Cat: The Magic Bag (score for short cartoon film) performed by the AP Wind Quintet.

March 2011 brought the impressively well-attended Grooves Unspoken: Music by Yvette Audain, a self-curated programme consisting entirely of Yvette's own music and recorded for broadcast by Radio New Zealand Concert at St Lukes Church, Remuera, Auckland. This was in proud association with the 2011 Auckland Fringe Festival.

While living in Melbourne in 2012, Yvette was a member of the all-female Dixieland jazz band Frilly Knickers, and also involved herself in smaller jazz combos. She especially enjoyed Melbourne's thriving scene of 'djammers' (so named after Django Reinhardt) - musicians devoted to the 'Hot Club de France' style of gypsy jazz.

Yvette returned to New Zealand from Australia in 2013, having then been commissioned to write Loop City, a collaboration with Melbourne poets Amanda Anastasi and Steve Smart. This substantial work was commissioned and performed by violinist Sarah Curro, has received many performances, and is available on CD. Yvette has also completed substantial arranging and transcription projects for Melbourne's Cairo Club Orchestra.

In 2014 Grooves Unspoken was finally released as an album, with release gigs held in Auckland and Wellington. The following year Yvette was honoured to perform the late Jonathan Besser's music with his band The Zestniks at Auckland Jazz Festival.

Yvette was an active participant in the 2019 ‘Tuia - Encounters 250’ commemorations, Whitianga, with performances as part of Neighbouring Planets and the Mercury Bay Big Band, for the latter of whom she was commissioned to compose a new work Celestial Navigation with funding from Creative Communities and Thames Coromandel District Council.

In 2022 Yvette closed out seven years of living and working in Whitianga by completing a commission for Masterton-based pianist Sharon Joy Vogan Cawston who recorded and released it as part of Suite Aotearoa, a CD compilation of landscape preludes by various New Zealand composers, through Atoll Records in 2023.

In January 2024 Yvette completed Primary Classroom Teaching Level 1 in the Kodály method of musical pedagogy, through the Cuskelly College of Music in Brisbane, Australia; in April of the same year she completed Orff Schulwerk Level 1 in Auckland through Orff New Zealand Aotearoa (ONZA).

Yvette has considerable experience as a tutor of all her instruments, composing and singing, in both New Zealand and Australia. She is currently a composition mentor in several Auckland schools through the AP alongside her work as an itinerant woodwind tutor.

Yvette holds a Bachelor of Music in composition and clarinet from the University of Auckland, and a Bachelor of Music (First Class Honours) in composition and ethnomusicology from Victoria University of Wellington (now the New Zealand School of Music), where she subsequently completed her Master of Music (with Merit) in composition. After being awarded these qualifications, Yvette went on to complete a Graduate Diploma in Teaching (Secondary) from the University of Auckland. During her student days she was also the grateful recipient of several scholarships and prizes.

Yvette is always contactable and willing to consider further commissions and gigs - see the 'contact me' page of this site.

- Yvette Audain, July 2025